Day: October 16, 2020

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Friday that a sixth-month randomized trial of COVID-19 treatments found “conclusive evidence” that remdesivir, a drug used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump when he fell ill, has little or no effect on severe cases of the virus.
 
The WHO, in what they said was the world’s largest randomized control trial on COVID-19 therapeutics, tested remdesivir and three other drugs – hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon – as part the agency’s research to determine if existing drugs might be effective in treating COVID-19.
 
At a news briefing at WHO headquarters in Geneva Friday, a WHO spokesman said the results of the study, which was not peer-reviewed, “indicate that remdesivir hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon regimens appear to have little or no effect on 28-day mortality, or the in-hospital course of COVID-19 among hospitalized patients.”
 
The WHO said the study, which covered more than 30 countries, looked at the effects of the treatments on overall death rates, whether patients need breathing machines, and how much time patients spent recovering in hospitals.
 
Previous studies had already ruled out three of the drugs. But the findings run counter to a clinical trial of remdesivir by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in April which indicated the drug accelerated the recovery rates of people with severe cases of COVID-19.
 
The company that makes remdesivir, Gilead Sciences, Inc., saw the price of its stock begin to fall as the news of the WHO study broke Friday. The company issued a statement saying data appeared inconsistent, the findings were premature and referenced the other studies, such as the one by the NIH, which had validated the drug’s benefits.
 
Remdesivir was among an array of drugs used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump when he contracted COVID-19 earlier this month.
 
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Finland’s prime minister Friday became the second European Union leader to leave a two-day summit as a precautionary measure, after contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.  On Twitter, Sanna Marin wrote she was leaving the European Council meeting in Brussels and asked Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Lofven, to represent Finland at the talks, where leaders were wearing face masks and keeping their distance amid a spike in COVID-19 infections across Europe. Marin had participated in a meeting Wednesday at the Finnish parliament in Helsinki with lawmaker Tom Packalen, who later tested positive for COVID-19 and had mild symptoms. Marin’s early departure follows a similar decision by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who left the meeting Thursday to self-isolate after learning one of her support staff members had tested positive.  FILE – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrives for an EU summit at the European Council building in Brussels, Oct. 15, 2020.It was the second time this month Von der Leyen had to take such a precaution. She went into isolation Oct. 5 after a meeting in Portugal that included someone who later tested positive. It is unclear why the European Union chose to hold its October summit in person rather than virtually while the continent is facing a surge in new COVID-19 cases.  Marin gave a speech at the summit supporting videoconferences for meeting between EU leaders, saying there should be a higher threshold for holding in-person meetings during the pandemic. 
 
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YouTube is following the lead of Twitter and Facebook, saying that it is taking more steps to limit QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories that can lead to real-world violence.
The Google-owned video platform said Thursday it will now prohibit material targeting a person or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify violence.  
One example would be videos that threaten or harass someone by suggesting they are complicit in a conspiracy such as QAnon, which paints President Donald Trump as a secret warrior against a supposed child-trafficking ring run by celebrities and “deep state” government officials.
Pizzagate is another internet conspiracy theory — essentially a predecessor to QAnon — that would fall in the banned category. Its promoters claimed children were being harmed at a pizza restaurant in Washington. D.C. A man who believed in the conspiracy entered the restaurant in December 2016 and fired an assault rifle. He was sentenced to prison in 2017.
YouTube is the third of the major social platforms to announce policies intended rein in QAnon, a conspiracy theory they all helped spread.  
Twitter announced in July a crackdown on QAnon, though it did not ban its supporters from its platform. It did ban thousands of accounts associated with QAnon content and blocked URLs associated with it from being shared. Twitter also said that it would stop highlighting and recommending tweets associated with QAnon.  
Facebook, meanwhile, announced last week that it was banning groups that openly support QAnon. It said it would remove pages, groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon — even if they don’t promote violence.  
The social network said it will consider a variety of factors in deciding whether a group meets its criteria for a ban. Those include the group’s name, its biography or “about” section, and discussions within the page or group on Facebook, or account on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
Facebook’s move came two months after it announced softer crackdown, saying said it would stop promoting the group and its adherents. But that effort faltered due to spotty enforcement.  
YouTube said it had already removed tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and eliminated hundreds of channels under its existing policies — especially those that explicitly threaten violence or deny the existence of major violent events.  
“All of this work has been pivotal in curbing the reach of harmful conspiracies, but there’s even more we can do to address certain conspiracy theories that are used to justify real-world violence, like QAnon,” the company said in Thursday’s  blog post.  
Experts said the move shows that YouTube is taking threats around violent conspiracy theories seriously and recognizes the importance of limiting the spread of such conspiracies. But, with QAnon increasingly creeping into mainstream politics and U.S. life, they wonder if it is too late.  
“While this is an important change, for almost three years YouTube was a primary site for the spread of QAnon,” said Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who studies QAnon. “Without the platform Q would likely remain an obscure conspiracy. For years YouTube provided this radical group an international audience.”
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The Czech Republic’s health minister said Friday the country’s health system needs be ready for a “huge influx,” of COVID-19 patients over the next 10 days to two weeks, as the nation faces Europe’s fastest growing rate in new coronavirus cases.Health Minister Roman Prymula told reporters at a news briefing in Prague the nation is looking at perhaps as much as a three-week surge of COVID-19 patients.At a time when all of Europe is facing an increase in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Czech Republic has been hit perhaps the hardest.  The European Center for Disease Control and Prevention says the Czech Republic leads the continent in the rate of new infections over the past two weeks, with nearly 702 cases per 100,000 people in the past two weeks, and nearly 50,000 of its total of 149,010 cases registered last week alone. The country also leads Europe in rate of deaths from the virus over the same period, 5.2 per 100,000 people.The Czech health ministry’s figures show the day-to-day increase reached 9,721 on Thursday, 177 more than the previous record set a day earlier.Hospitals across the country have been postponing unnecessary operations to focus on the growing number of COVID-19 patients. While Prymula said the country has doubled patient capacity, he says facilities could be full by the end of October.The Czech military will start to build a field hospital for 500 patients at Prague’s exhibition center over the weekend. Neighboring Germany has offered to take in some overflow intensive care patients.Officials say of the Czech Republic’s 84,430 people currently ill with the virus, 2,920 need hospitalization, 242 more than the previous day, with 543 in serious condition. 
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A predicted spike in COVID-19 cases as the cold weather months approach in the Northern Hemisphere seems to be occurring.Daily global cases have climbed to 330,000 per day, with Europe and the U.S. experiencing a worrying uptick.In the U.S., the nation’s top infectious disease expert told Americans to rethink their Thanksgiving plans for late November when many people traditionally travel through teeming transportation centers, such as bus depots, train stations, and airports to be with their families.“If you have vulnerable people, the elderly or people that have underlying conditions, you better consider whether you want to do that now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC News. He suggested people perhaps delay plans and “just … wait” until the pandemic is under control.“We really have to be careful this time that each individual family evaluates the risk-benefit,” Fauci added.On Saturday, France will begin a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for the region of Paris and at least seven other cities, including Lyon, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Lille, Rouen and Saint-Étienne. The curfew will remain in effect for at least four weeks.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and governors of the country’s 16 states have agreed to impose a new round of nationwide restrictions after seeing record-high new COVID-19 cases. The restrictions include the early closure of bars and restaurants and limiting the number of people allowed to gather in public.Northern Ireland has announced a nationwide four-week lockdown, with schools closed for two weeks and all pubs and restaurants closed for the full month, except for pickup and delivery of food.London is about to be put under the second level of the government’s new three-tiered coronavirus alert system, which designates areas as medium, high and very high risk. The city of Liverpool has been placed under the highest tier, leading officials to close all restaurants and bars.There are now nearly 39 million worldwide COVID-19 cases and more than a million people have died from the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
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Little Kurt looks like any other baby horse as he frolics playfully in his pen. He isn’t afraid to kick or head-butt an intruder who gets in his way and, when he’s hungry, he dashes over to his mother for milk.But 2-month-old Kurt differs from every other foal of his kind in one distinct way: He’s a clone.The rare, endangered Przewalski’s horse was created from cells taken from a stallion in 1980. They sat frozen at the San Diego Zoo for 40 years before they were fused with an egg from a domestic horse.With the egg’s nucleus removed, ensuring Kurt would be basically all Przewalski’s horse, they were implanted in the mare who would become his mom on Aug. 6.The result, officials say, was the world’s first cloned Przewalski’s horse.Scientists have cloned nearly two dozen kinds of mammals, including dogs, cats, pigs, cows and polo ponies. In 2018, researchers in China created monkeys for the first time using the cloning techniques that produced Dolly the sheep.The zoo sees Kurt’s birth as a milestone in efforts to restore the population of the horse also known as the Asiatic Wild Horse or Mongolian Wild Horse. The small, stocky animals (they stand only about 1.2 to 1.5 meters tall at the withers) are believed extinct in the wild and number only about 2,000 in zoos and wildlife habitats. Their limited gene pool puts them at a reproductive disadvantage.“This colt is expected to be one of the most genetically important individuals of his species,” Bob Wiese, chief life sciences officer at San Diego Zoo Global, which operates the zoo, said in a statement. “We are hopeful that he will bring back genetic variation important for the future of the Przewalski’s horse population.”Although only 2 months old, Kurt’s birth was made possible in 1980 when cells were taken from a 5-year-old stallion and put in deep freeze at San Diego’s Frozen Zoo facility. His father died in 1998.Kurt was named for Kurt Benirschke, who played a key role in founding the Frozen Zoo with its extensive research program and cell cultures.“A central tenet of the Frozen Zoo, when it was established by Dr. Benirschke, was that it would be used for purposes not possible at the time,” said Oliver Ryder, director of genetics at San Diego Zoo Global.The zoo worked in collaboration with the California conservation group Revive & Restore and the Texas-based company ViaGen Equine in creating Kurt.He was born at a veterinary facility in Texas, where he’ll continue to live with his mother for most likely another year.Eventually he’ll be integrated into the zoo’s Przewalski’s horse population, where it’s hoped that someday he’ll become a father himself.Przewalski’s horses take their official name from Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski, who found a skull and hide of one and shared it with a Russian museum.At one time they ranged throughout Europe and Asia, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Biology Conservation Institute. Encroaching human population and livestock eventually pushed them out of Europe and east to parts of Asia like the Gobi Desert. Outside of zoos, they exist today only in reintroduction sites in Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan.According to the Smithsonian, they are the only true wild horses left in the world. The institute maintains wild horse herds in North America and Australia don’t count because they are the descendants of escaped domesticated horses.
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Having contained its first brush with the novel coronavirus even as infections in neighboring countries surged, Myanmar is now straining to check a soaring second wave with a health care system blighted by decades of neglect under military rule.In early August, the Southeast Asian country of 54 million was still going days without logging a single new COVID-19 infection and had only 374 total confirmed cases by the middle of the month. Cases have skyrocketed since then, however, to more than 31,000 as of Oct. 14, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center in the U.S.Myanmar logged 2,158 cases on Oct. 10, its highest daily count to date. COVID-related deaths have also jumped, from just six as of Sept. 3 to 732.Local reports say monasteries, schools and government offices are being repurposed as quarantine facilities to help share the load with a creaking public health care system, and that patients who have tested positive for the virus have been forced to share rooms with those who have not.World Health Organization country representative Dr. Stephan Jost called this an “emergency period” for Myanmar.’Turning point’Critics have accused authorities of being slow to take the virus seriously. Well into March, government spokesperson Zaw Htay told reporters the country was still case-free because of people’s lifestyle and diet.But Jost insisted Myanmar was on top of the pandemic starting in early January, banning flights from Wuhan, China, where it began, by the end of the month, canceling visas-on-arrival for visitors from all of China on Feb. 1, and setting up a powerful committee — later led by State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi — to coordinate the government’s response.He said the “turning point” came in mid-August when a communal transmission case was detected in Sittwe, capital of the far western state of Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh, where major outbreaks were well underway.”And it’s really from then on that this second wave was, if you like, culminating into a very big challenge for the country, which it continues to be,” said Jost.Confirmation took a few days, he added, which “means that there was transmission happening a few days before that. And this also showed that with the continuing communication, say, by domestic flights, the potential of spread from Sittwe to practically every other part of Myanmar via Yangon [Myanmar’s commercial hub] is obviously there. And that is borne out by the transmission pattern that we have been seeing since.”Cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the capital, Naypyitaw, and 13 of the country’s 14 states and regions.Jost said Myanmar’s success keeping the first wave relatively small may have lulled authorities into lowering their guard, making way for the second. Lockdown orders on Yangon and elsewhere were lifted by the end of June.”Perhaps some of the measures were relaxed a little early, like we’ve seen in other places, without the virus actually having gone away,” he said.Given how infectious the novel coronavirus is, though, and how threadbare the public health care system Myanmar had to meet it with, Jost said the latest wave was to some degree “almost inevitable.”Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the region. The WHO ranked its heath care system the worst in the world overall in 2000, the last time the U.N. agency published a global index. For the next decade the military junta spent less than 2% of Myanmar’s gross domestic product on health care per year on average, World Bank Figures show. Spending on health care only began to rise after the country started transforming into a quasi-democracy in 2011.LockdownEven so, the second wave might have been smaller had the government locked down Rakhine sooner than it did, said Joshua Poole, country director for Catholic Relief Services, a U.S.-based charity.Within a week of detecting the communal transmission case in mid-August, the government had locked down Sittwe, followed by a few more townships and the entire state by the end of the month.”It just wasn’t fast enough,” said Poole, who is also a member of the steering committee of Myanmar’s International Non-Governmental Organization Forum, which has been working with the government in responding to the pandemic.He believes a quicker return of stay-at-home orders in Yangon, which came in late September, would likely have helped even more.Most COVID-19 cases are now being found in greater Yangon, Myanmar’s most populous region, with more than 8 million residents, and also its most densely packed.”It took a while to get back to the point where there was the stay-at-home orders, and I think that’s really what caused the cases to blow up in Yangon,” said Poole.Considering that the population has been following authorities’ diktats fairly closely, he added, “if the government would have done that a week or two earlier then, you know, I think that would have helped quite a bit.”On the whole, though, Jost and Poole have been impressed with the government’s response to the pandemic, given the budget and health care staff it has to work with, and said the outbreak was not yet out of control.Jost has been especially impressed by the rapid rate at which Myanmar has been ramping up its testing capacity, from “literally zero” at the start to between 10,000 and 15,000 a day now, one reason for the rising infection numbers.That may not yet be enough, though. Poole said the government was reporting positivity rates of between 15% and 19%, suggesting that transmission was also high and that many infections were still not being caught. Countries that have managed to test a much larger share of their populations and started to bring their own outbreaks under control tend to report positivity rates of around 5% or less.Eyes on RakhinePoole said more and faster testing will be key for Myanmar to turn the corner. That’s tough enough in Yangon. It will be harder still in Rakhine, where the second wave started and infections are also mounting.Intense fighting between the military and Arakan Army, an ethnic armed group that wants autonomy for Rakhine, has consumed the north of the state since late 2019, killing hundreds and displacing many thousands into dangerously crowded camps.The International Crisis Group, a global research and advocacy nonprofit, warned that the conflict was a “potential health disaster” in May. Richard Horsey, a senior advisor to the group based in Myanmar, said the fighting has only picked up since then, putting added strain on the local health system and making it all the harder to test and see how the virus is spreading.”It just isn’t possible to roll out the kind of public health measures and responses that you need to do in a context of conflict,” he said.”Although Yangon is currently the focus of a lot of effort because of the large number of cases there, it’s very important that the public health authorities and the government don’t take their eye off Rakhine state,” he added.Myanmar’s Health and Sports Ministry did not reply to VOA’s repeated requests for an interview.
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The decision by Twitter to block the dissemination of a story on its site about Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, has added to an already heated discussion in the U.S. about whether internet companies have too much power and are making decisions that could affect the U.S. elections.Some have applauded Twitter’s move as a stand against misinformation. Others have criticized Twitter’s decision as biased, curtailing speech in a way that could affect the outcome of the U.S. election.In recent weeks, Twitter, Facebook and Google, the owner of YouTube, have increasingly taken steps to restrict the spread of what they describe as misinformation and extremist speech on their sites. After the 2016 U.S. election, internet companies were criticized for not doing enough to stop misinformation on their services.This week, Twitter blocked certain accounts on its site as they tried to share a story by the New York Post that cited supposed email exchanges between Hunter Biden and a Ukrainian official about setting up a meeting with Hunter Biden’s father when Joe Biden was the U.S. vice president. The story claimed to rely on records from a computer drive that was allegedly abandoned by Hunter Biden. Rudy Giuliani, lawyer to President Donald Trump, reportedly gave the drive to the Post.No meeting, campaign saysThe Biden campaign said it had “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.””Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden.FILE – President Donald Trump holds up a copy of the New York Post as he speaks before signing an executive order aimed at curbing protections for social media giants, in the Oval Office of the White House, May 28, 2020.No tweeting, no sharingCiting the firm’s hacked-materials policy, Twitter blocked the Post’s ability to tweet about the story from its Twitter account. It also blocked the Trump campaign and other accounts from sharing the story.Facebook said it reduced the reach of the post, pending fact checking from third party fact-checkers.For Lisa Kaplan, chief executive of the Alethea Group, which tracks misinformation and online threats, Twitter’s recent decisions to block some posts are a good sign.“I do applaud Twitter’s efforts and the stances they have taken to address disinformation, making it so that people can’t share a link known to be false that could have potential implications on the election,” she said. “It’s an important step if they are truly going to be a source of accurate information for their users.”GOP respondsThe reaction from Republicans over the Post story has been swift. Senate Republicans said Thursday that they would subpoena Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, to testify next week. Dorsey should “explain why Twitter is abusing their corporate power to silence the press,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican.Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said he had sent a letter to Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, asking them to testify at a committee hearing.The companies’ decision about the Post stories throws fuel on an issue that has gained traction over the past year: whether companies are publishers, making editorial decisions, or “platforms,” places where people share information but with the companies providing little oversight of what’s said.FILE – FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testifies at a House subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 5, 2019.Protections weighedCongressional leaders of both parties are considering whether to strip the companies of some of their legal protections that say they aren’t responsible for the speech on their sites. On Thursday, Republican Ajit Pai, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, said the agency would consider weakening the legal protections the companies enjoy.Some Democrats as well have called for stripping the internet firms of some of their legal protections.With the decision about the Post story, Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, says the internet firms have not moved closer to being publishers.“If you have a business and the last thing you want is untruthful stories, then you can say, ‘We’re uncomfortable to share this with millions of people globally.’ That’s your right,” Paulson said. “I don’t think we want to mistake Facebook or Twitter for a public utility. And I don’t think a simple ban on content you believe to be unreliable and fraudulent makes you a publisher.“A company has a right to decide what it stands for, and that’s where we are now with Twitter and Facebook,” he said.One thing is certain: With the internet firms making decisions almost daily about curtailing or blocking posts, lawmakers and regulators will have more fodder to point to for changing the rules.
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